INCLUDED IN ALL PAID PLANS, CERTIFICATE INCLUDED
Technical SEO 2: Crawlability and indexability course
Make sure search engines can find, read, and index your site
Crawlability and indexability sound technical, and they are, but you don’t need to be a developer to get them right. This course breaks down how search engines discover and read your content, in plain English, so you can make sure nothing you publish goes unseen.
Included in Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast WooCommerce SEO, Yoast SEO for Shopify and Yoast SEO AI+
Not sure yet? Start your free sample lesson
2 hours of video
Across 5 lessons
Certificate included
And a badge for your site
No experience needed
Built for beginners, explained in plain English
Why crawlability and indexability matter for SEO
Search engines can only rank content they can find and read. Crawlability is about whether search engines can reach your pages in the first place; indexability is about whether they can add what they find to their index. If either breaks down, your content has no chance of being discovered, no matter how good it is.
You don’t need to be a developer to stay on top of this. You just need to know how crawling and indexing work, where to check your own site’s status, and what to do when something’s blocking search engines from doing their job. That’s what this course covers.
Who teaches this course
The SEO and WordPress experts at Yoast create every lesson in this course, including a dedicated Q&A with Joost de Valk, Yoast’s founder, answering the questions people ask most about crawlability and indexability.
- They build the #1 SEO plugin for WordPress
- Combined, they have over 100 years of WordPress experience
Go at your own pace
No deadlines, and your access doesn’t expire.
Pick up where you left off
Your progress is saved automatically.
Works on any host
The fundamentals apply wherever your site is hosted.
What topics are covered in the course
Hosting
What crawlability and indexability mean, and how to make sure your site can be found by search engines.
Server configuration
Why XML sitemaps matter, and how to put one into practice on your own site.
Checking your indexability
How to check your indexability with Google Search Console.
How to block crawlers
How to block crawlers from specific pages, keep your entire site out of the search results, and use robots.txt.
Optimize crawlability with Yoast
How to use IndexNow and Yoast SEO’s crawl optimization settings to help search engines crawl your site more efficiently.
Q&A
Joost de Valk, Yoast’s founder, answers the most common questions about crawlability and indexability.
Hosting isn’t the exciting part of SEO, but it’s the part that either quietly supports everything you do or quietly undermines it. Bad hosting doesn’t announce itself, it shows up as slow pages, occasional downtime, and crawls that quietly fail, problems you’ll blame on your content long before you blame your server. Get it right once, and stop worrying about it.
A. Alani – Sr. Software Engineer, Bluehost
What you get
Did you know?
Part of Yoast SEO Academy
This is the second course in Yoast’s technical SEO series. Before this, Technical SEO: Hosting and server configuration covers choosing the right host and understanding your server setup.
Yoast SEO Premium
Unlock this course + Yoast SEO Premium
This course is included in every paid Yoast plan, alongside real-time SEO guidance while you write, AI-assisted suggestions, and full Yoast SEO Academy access.
- Real-time SEO and readability guidance built into your publishing workflow
- New academy courses added to your plan as they launch
- The Yoast SEO Premium plugin, with guidance built into WordPress as you write
- Local SEO, News SEO, and Video SEO plugins
- One seat for the Yoast SEO Google Docs add-on, check drafts before they reach WordPress
- 24/7 support from real people
Running WooCommerce or Shopify instead? Yoast WooCommerce SEO and Yoast SEO for Shopify include this course too.
No single fix guarantees a ranking outcome. Making sure search engines can crawl and index your site properly removes barriers that would otherwise stop your content from being found, which gives it a fair chance to be discovered.
Crawling is how a search engine discovers your pages. Indexing is what happens after: the search engine decides whether to add what it found to its index. A page can be crawled and still not indexed.
No. This course is built for site owners, not developers. Every technical term gets explained in plain English as it comes up.
Sometimes you don’t want certain pages showing up in search results, like internal search pages or staging content. The course walks through the different ways to do this and what each one actually does.
Just want to watch the videos? That’s about an hour. Want to read the suggested materials and do the quizzes too? Budget 2 to 3 hours in total. It’s self-paced, so take it as slowly or quickly as you like.
Get yourself a coffee and join us monthly to catch up on SEO
You’re busy running a site or a team, not tracking every SEO headline. The SEO Update by Yoast fits into one coffee break a month: our Principal SEOs break down what’s actually happening across search and AI, so you don’t have to piece it together yourself. Recorded live with audience Q&A, and a recording’s available afterward if you can’t join live.
Expert analysis of the latest SEO & AI news developments with Carolyn…